Burying the Unknown Soldier 25 years ago a turning point for Australia

No one could have anticipated it, but the burial of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial 25 years ago forever changed the way we commemorate war.

By Sally Pryor

10 November 2018

World War I veteran David Ainsworth travelled from Sydney to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the unknown soldier in 1994. The old digger served in a field artillery unit during the Great War.Credit:Canberra Times

“He is all of them. And he is one of us.” It’s 25 years since then prime minister Paul Keating gave one of his most rousing speeches, in a career known for its masterful oratory.

He gave it at the burial service for an unknown Australian soldier, exhumed from a First World War cemetery in France, and now entombed in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial.

It was November 11, 1993, on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Great War. The event was televised live as tens of thousands of people lined Anzac Parade to watch the gun carriage carrying the soldier in his coffin up to the memorial.

Thousands more lined up in the following days to lay single flowers on the tomb. As they waited along the cloisters, people began pushing paper poppies into the names on the Roll of Honour, sparking a tradition that continues today. And in the days before, as the soldier had lain in state at Old Parliament House, the queues of people waiting to pay their respects even then had been muted and patient. The flowers piled up.

Former deputy director of the Australian War Memorial, Michael McKernan with former director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendon Kelson, 25 years since the Unknown Solider was interred in the Hall of Memory behind them. Credit:Elesa Kurtz

The ceremony itself went like clockwork. The sky was blue, and school children read from the Roll of Honour as dignitaries took their seats. The military pallbearers didn’t falter as they transported the lead-lined coffin - made of Tasmanian oak and adorned with just a slouch hat and a bayonet - into the Hall of Memory. The horses barely moved a muscle as Keating gave his famous speech and the Last Post sounded.

Today, this hardly looks like a phenomenon, as dawn service crowds grow bigger each year, and media coverage of Anzac Day and Remembrance Day ceremonies is ever more elaborate.

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Funeral service and entombment of the unknown Australia soldier.
Credit:Graham Tidy

But back in 1993, such a reaction was by no means inevitable, or even anticipated.

In fact, the idea of bringing home an unknown Australian digger had only become a reality the year before. And in the months leading up to the event, the memorial had struggled to drum up much interest, from either the public or the media, in what they were doing. Even the ABC was initially hesitant to agree to broadcast the event.

By the time the coffin had arrived in Australia from France, however, Australia was invested. Front pages were given over to the event for days, and television coverage was at saturation point.

The day was a turning point, both for the War Memorial, and for how Australians would henceforth engage in war commemoration.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating delivers his speech at the funeral service and entombment of the unknown Australia soldier. Credit:Graham Tidy

And yet, the process leading up to the day had been fraught with uncertainty.

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Plans to bring back an unknown soldier to Australia had been proposed since the 1920s, but the Returned Services League had always maintained that Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, in Westminster Abbey in London, was there ostensibly to represent the empire.

But attitudes had shifted by the 1990s. The federal government was ramping up commemorative activities and prime minister Bob Hawke had already accompanied veterans on a trip back to Gallipoli for the 75th anniversary of the landing.

Meanwhile, the memorial was pondering what to do with the Hall of Memory, the distinctive dome at the centre of the building. Historian Michael McKernan, who at the time was the memorial’s deputy director, remembers this as the starting point for the whole project.

The dome had originally been designated for the Roll of Honour, but by the time the memorial opened, in 1941, another world war was well underway, and it was clear the space wouldn’t be sufficient to record the names of all the Australian war dead.

This left a church-like space that seemed to have no ostensible purpose. Visitors didn’t know what to make of it.

Around this time, then-director Brendon Kelson and his management team were also wondering how best to mark the 75th anniversary of the Armistice.

A decision was made, McKernan was appointed project manager, and he and his team had just 12 months to make the planned ceremony for the burial of an unknown soldier a reality.

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As recently as the previous year, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the body responsible for Commonwealth war graves worldwide, had knocked back a request to allow Australia to bring back a body. No other country in the British empire had done it, so why should Australia?

Zoe Sander lays a flower at the coffin of the unknown soldier in Kings Hall at Old Parliament House.Credit:Gary Schafer

But by early 1993, the commission finally approved the exhumation, and McKernan and his team had their work cut out for them.

“First of all, we had to identify where we would get the remains from, secondly we had to ensure that they were, as I used to express it, ‘adequate human remains’,” he says.

“Then we had to get the approval of the government in which lands the remains lay to bring them back to Australia, then we had to arrange the return.”

Back home, the memorial held a design competition for the tomb, eventually choosing the only one that involved placing the tomb in the ground, rather than on a plinth.

Plans for the inscription, “An unknown Australian soldier killed in the war of 1914–1918”, were met with resistance from the Royal Australian Navy, which petitioned to have the inscription changed from “soldier” to “warrior”, as there was a chance - a fairly slim one - that the unknown man had been a sailor.

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The argument, says McKernan, was swiftly dispensed with.

“'Warrior' isn't an Australian word, and these men were not warriors,” he says.

“They were part-time soldiers who'd enlisted briefly and went on with the rest of their lives, if they survived.”

Funeral service and entombment of the unknown Australia soldier. Credit:Graham Tidy

In the meantime, McKernon and his team consulted with the CSIRO as to the type of cemetery most likely to contain what they were looking for. The answer - a well-drained area in chalky ground - led them eventually to the Adelaide Cemetery in Villers-Bretonneux, the French village that had been recaptured by Australian soldiers in June 1918.

The cemetery contained a large number of unknown Australian soldiers reburied from various battlefields after the war.

Kelson travelled to France in late October with Richard Reid, the memorial’s executive officer and McKernon’s deputy on the project, with Australian veteran and former funeral director Rob Allison to oversee the practicalities. By then, the War Graves Commission had chosen four possible graves in the cemetery.

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Reid set out to the cemetery with various dignitaries and French soldiers, early in the morning of November 2.

“It was cold and misty. It sounds like something out of Dracula, but it was true,” he says.

As the gardeners started the process of opening the first grave, Reid recalls feeling a certain amount of trepidation.

“The great anxiety was, what if we move to all four graves and we haven't got anything?” he says.

“That was the worst-case scenario, because Michael had said to me before leaving Australia, ‘Don't come back with a handful of dust’, which is fair enough.”

The Catafalque party guards the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

As it happened, the very first grave contained exactly what was required; the War Graves Commission had extensive knowledge of every cemetery was what was likely to be discovered underneath the soil.

“The commission knew the map reference from where the body was taken, for all of them,” he said.

“But this soldier, they did not know, they had no record. He was as anonymous as you could make him - nobody could trace him back to a location.”

The remains were placed in the lead-lined coffin, and the young French soldiers carried it through the cemetery. Although the occasion was solemn, Reid remembers almost everyone present laughing at the sight of the young French soldiers negotiating the heavy coffin.

“The War Graves Commission guy and I watched this hilarious scene as Rob Allison taught these young soldiers how to carry a coffin, and the other guy how to dead-march. We hadn't anticipated that,” Reid says.

From there, the soldier’s journey home was executed with both simplicity and military precision, from the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, then onto Ypres, in Belgium, and then the Cambrai airfield, from where it was flown to Paris. There it boarded a Qantas passenger jet - renamed the Spirit of Remembrance for the occasion - and flew to Sydney, where it was collected by an RAAF Hercules and flown to Canberra.

But this soldier, they did not know, they had no record. He was as anonymous as you could make him.

Richard Reid, war memorial executive officer

When the coffin arrived here on November 8, it was taken to Old Parliament House, to lie in state in Kings Hall. Until then, the public response had not been anticipated.

“We didn't know if anyone was going to think this was a useful thing to do,” says McKernan. In fact, even the then-Governor-General Bill Hayden, who had been designated chief mourner, had misgivings.

“He said to me, ‘What if people just think this is a joke, that it's just stupid to be reburying someone who's been buried for 75 years?” says McKernan.

“‘What if I'm walking up Anzac Parade behind the gun carriage with the coffin on top and people are standing on the side pointing and laughing?’ I said, ‘I don't think that's going to happen’. But it was a possibility, I suppose.”

Later on, Hayden himself would recall his astonishment at the way the event was received by the public, at the expressions on people’s faces as the gun carriage passed.

“He said, ‘I've never seen Australian faces look like that. They were so moved, so involved, so deeply committed to what was being done, there was intensity on their faces and a respect that I have never before seen in my life’,” McKernan says.

And when World War I digger Bob Comb sprinkled dirt from the Pozieres battlefield onto the coffin and murmured, “You’re back home, mate”, it was all Hayden could do not to start weeping.

Apart from being an amazing feat of public relations, Kelson says the event also represented a pivotal moment for the War Memorial itself.

World War I digger Bob Comb, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.Credit:Fairfax Media

“It was a watershed in the history of the memorial because it completed the story, in effect, of Australians in wars through the 20th century, and set the mark for where it might go into the future,” he says.

“It finally brought together all those stories. You had all the collected material, you had the Roll of Honour and you had that Hall of Memory, which was an empty space.

When we had decided on bringing back an unknown Australian soldier, it closed the gap; it turned that area, in a sense, to a sanctified space, a kind of Anzac religiosity, if you like, for the whole institution. It brought all these elements together.”

The Australian War Memorial will be hosting a number of public events to mark Remembrance Day on Sunday, November 11. For bookings and information, visit awm.gov.au.